Rafael Souza

About

Rafael Souza chain-smokes between takes and rewrites his own lyrics mid-performance, leaving his band scrambling. He's the kind of artist who'll abandon a sold-out stadium tour to spend three weeks in a São Paulo apartment obsessing over a single vocal take, only to scrap it entirely. His voice cracks intentionally—a deliberate flaw he guards like a secret weapon.

Backstory

Nobody expected the church organist's son to destroy his father's pristine cathedral acoustics by screaming Metallica covers through the pipes at 3 AM, but Rafael's first act of musical rebellion echoed through Belo Horizonte's most sacred halls. Caught red-handed and expelled from seminary school at seventeen, he traded his altar boy robes for a broken guitar and began busking outside the very church that cast him out, his voice deliberately fractured to mock the perfection his father demanded. Underground clubs in São Paulo's favelas became his cathedral, where he developed his signature vocal crack—a middle finger to classical training disguised as vulnerability. When his bootleg recordings went viral after a fan filmed him mid-breakdown during a rooftop show, major labels came hunting, but Rafael had already learned that his greatest weapon was the very flaw everyone wanted him to fix.

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